Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)

III. Life in Vienna

60 EVIDENCE FROM CLINICAL WORK

instruction, but the First Clinic had lost its painful distinction for high mortality as compared with the Second Clinic.

The Commissioners of 1846 had declared that the foreign students were more dangerous to the patients because they made examinations in a rougher manner, but that was not the real reason. It was this: The foreigners come to Vienna to complete, in a few months, the medical studies which they have begun at some other university. They attend the pathological and medicolegal autopsies at the General Hospital. They take courses of pathological anatomy, of surgical, obstetrical and ophthalmological operations on the cadaver, and they attend the clinical work in medicine and surgery : in a word they do all they can in the time at their disposal, and they consequently find frequent occasions for rendering their hands unclean with putrid animal-organic material, and when they are practising midwifery as well, simultaneously, it is easy to understand how they endanger the lives of lying-in women.

“On that account we have no more right to reproach them than to blame myself and others who, when we knew no better than examine parturient women with hands smelling of the dissecting-room, caused so many deaths.”

With the object of supporting my opinions by means of direct investigation and proof, I thought it advisable and necessary to make some experiments on animals. These experiments were conducted upon rabbits with the help of my friend Dr. Lautner, assistant to Professor Rokitansky.